News

PHP 5.4, the first major update since 2009, was finalized this month. This release includes several language enhancements including support for Traits as well as the removal of some controversial features.

Model Binding is a feature that simplifies controller actions by using the request data to create strongly typed objects. Jess Chadwick takes a deep dive into this feature in an MSDN article and explores complex scenarios, as well as creating custom model binders when the default model binder is not enough.

The Ruby on Rails team announced the first release candidate of Rails 3.2. New features include a faster development mode, an explain feature for database queries and several smaller features. After 3.2, the next major release of Rails will be 4.0 and drop support for Ruby 1.8.7

Unlike other templating engines that focus on given as much power as possible to the user, Liquid is designed to restrict what the user can do. The goal is to allow end-users to create their own templates without jeopardizing the security of the server. Originally created for Ruby, Liquid is now available for .NET as well.

For most types of applications dependency injection frameworks don’t make whole lot of sense. It is usually more than sufficient to manually wire up all of the dependencies during startup. But for ASP.NET MVC there are also session and request scoped dependencies. With so many competing lifecycles a DI framework quickly moves from needless distraction to an essential organizational tool.

When it comes to performance developers often need to turn to partial page caching. This report looks at the current state of caching in ASP.NET and introduces a new project for MVC 3 called MvcDonutCaching.

Scala+GWT makes it possible to run Scala in the browser, the latest release supports most of the language. The new Scala+GWT Eclipse plug-in uses GWT's development mode for faster turnaround. Also, the Scala team announced a new documentation website and the date for 2012's Scala Days conference.

Yahoo! has recently announced Cocktails, a set of technologies that make it easy to develop and host applications that can run on both client and server-side environments. Cocktails is composed of Yahoo! Mojito, an environment-agnostic JavaScript web application framework, and Yahoo! Manhattan, a hosted platform (PaaS) for Mojito-based applications.

Clojure is rather new member of the LISP family of languages which runs on the Java platform. Introduced in 2007 it has generated a lot of interest. InfoQ had a small Q&A with James Reeves and Christophe Grand, the creators of Enlive and Compojure, about their projects and their experiences working with Clojure.

Exactly one year after the last major released, the Ruby on Rails team released Rails 3.1. The highlights of this release are support for HTTP Streaming, more intelligent migrations and the new assets pipeline that makes it easier to use CoffeeScript and Sass.

The Model-View-Controller pattern is pretty much dominating professional, customer facing website design these days. While single-file scripts and form builder technologies still have a place, MVC seems to strike the right balance for many developers. The Fuel framework for PHP intends to capitalize on the work done by earlier MVC frameworks such as Ruby on Rails.

Adobe wants to strengthen Flash and Flex’s position in the enterprise and especially in the mobile space. But a recent study shows that jQuery has overtaken Flash as a deployed web solution on the top 17,000 websites.

Thymeleaf is an XML/XHTML/HTML5 template engine that works for web and non-web applications. It's an open source Java library distributed under Apache License 2.0. Thymeleaf is a replacement for JSP and other template engines like Velocity and FreeMarker. It comes in two versions, the Standard dialect and the SpringStandard (Spring MVC 3) dialect.